evidence in the history of Joseph, that during his time a native Egyptian sovereign filled the throne, and that the Egyptian constitution was in its full vigour. The Shepherd-kings may, to a certain degree, have assumed the manners of the more civilized Egyptians; we will not insist, therefore, on the state and ceremonial, the purveyors and cup-bearers, which encircled the throne of the Pharaoh; but it is quite clear, that on their first inroad the Shepherds were implacably hostile to the religion of Egypt. Yet in the history of Joseph the power of the priesthood was at its height. It is the great distinction of the stranger to marry him to the daughter of the Priest of the Sun, Pet-i-phrah, who dwelt at On, afterwards Heliopolis. The lands of the priesthood were sacred when Joseph obtained the sovereignty of all the rest of the territory for the crown. The peaceful policy of this latter measure has not much the character of a foreign and tyrannical usurpation. The jealousy, however feigned, lest the sons of Jacob should be foreign spies, the precursors of an hostile invasion; the Egyptian repugnance to eating with strangers; the abomination in which shepherds were held-(the obvious interpretation of this passage is by far the best,)-all these trifling incidents not only give an aspect of the most artless truthfulness to the narrative of Moses, but coincide in every point with all we know of genuine Egyptian manners and character. Of the Exodus of the Israelites, and its fatal circumstances, no record was likely to find a place in the proud monumental annals of Egypt. It is singular, however, that a remarkable obscurity seems to hang over the close of the splendid eighteenth dynasty. In all the lists, a different name is assigned to the last Pharaoh. Signor Rosellini assigns the Exodus to the close of the reign of Sesostris himself, but we have before stated that we have no great confidence in chronological computations, and most decidedly question the basis of his system, the arrival of Joseph in Egypt under the Shepherd-kings. Signor Rosellini gives the name of Verri to the last king of the eighteenth dynasty, and has discovered his tomb at Thebes, or rather an ancient tomb which he usurped from its rightful proprietors. Even if this be the tomb of the Pharaoh whose heart was hardened,' (which is exceedingly doubtful,) the believer in the sacred narrative need be under no apprehension. In our former article we referred to a work of a respectable Roman Catholic divine, M. Greppo, who has at least given some plausible enough reasons for his doubts whether there is any decisive authority in the Old Testament for the death of the king himself in the Red Sea. It is not till a much later period that the annals of the Hebrew nation and the monumental history of Egypt show a clear and distinct coincidence. The name of Sheshonk (Shishak), in conjunction with a cartouche which bears the title of Ioudaha Malek, Malek, the King of the Jews, ranks among the best-known discoveries of Champollion. This remarkable circumstance has flown through the country on the wings of all our Penny and Saturday Magazines. The names of the Ethiopian kings Sabaco, Sciabak, Sciabatok or Sevek, the Sevekus of Manetho, the So or Sua of the Old Testament, and Tirhakah (Tarak), are among the best authenticated of all the ancient legends. But we must reserve sufficient space to notice the very curious illustration of the public and private life of the Egyptians contained in the engravings to the great Tuscan work. The engraver, however, appears to advance with so much greater rapidity than the author the detailed explanation of the text is still wanting to so considerable a part of the numbers of the Monumenti Civili' already published-that we must content ourselves with a rapid general view of this interesting subject, and chiefly confine ourselves to the earlier numbers. Mr. Wilkinson's highly curious fifth chapter on the private life of the ancient Egyptians will occasionally furnish us with valuable explanatory matter. It is extraordinary that we should possess more ample and minute details of the private and public life of this most ancient people, than even of the Greeks and Romans, at least if the Horatian maxim be true Segnius irritant animum demissa per aures Pompeii itself, as Signor Rosellini observes, does not give so extensive or various a view of the everyday occupations of the Romans, as the Catacombs of Egypt do of that primeval people. Pompeii is a small, elegant, and luxurious town, with all its buildings, houses, theatres, baths, and tombs; it gives us a perfect insight into the ordinary way of living in a Campanian city of its class; the forms of the dwellings, the arrangement of the chambers, the utensils, the implements of various kinds, whether for household use or for amusement, seem stored away, as if by express design, and carefully wrapped up in the ashes and scoria which cover the city, for the wonder of later ages. But the paintings on the walls, exquisitely graceful as they are, are in general on wellknown mythological subjects; they rarely, excepting in a few comic pieces, descend to ordinary life. The pictures of the Isiac worship are very curious, and the landscapes show more knowledge of perspective than the painters of that age had been supposed to possess; but they are still poetic and imaginative, rather than faithful representations of real scenes. In the Catacombs of Egypt, on the other hand, every act of every department of life seems to have been carefully copied, and the imperfection of the art of design increases rather than diminishes the interest of their pictures, as they evidently VOL. LII. NO. CV. K adhere adhere with most unimaginative fidelity to the truth of nature. A subterranean Egypt appears suddenly to have come to light; the people have been revived in all their castes; in their civil, and military, and religious occupations; in their feasts and their funerals; in their fields and their vineyards; in their amusements and their labours; in their shops, in their farmyards, in their kitchens; by land and by water; in their boats and their palanquins; in the splendid public procession, and the privacy of the household chamber. This singular propensity of the ancient Egyptians to decorate the 'eternal houses,' as they called them, of the dead, with the lavish splendour which other nations have reserved for the palaces and temples of the living, is one of the most remarkable, and still we conceive inexplicable, phenomena in the history of man. Many of these highly-adorned sepulchral chambers appear to be accessible only through long, narrow, and intricate passages; the approach to others seems to have been closed with the strictest care, and concealed with a kind of reverential sanctity. To each city, or at least to each nome of the living, belonged a city of the dead. In the silent and rock-hewn counterpart of Memphis and Thebes were treasured up all the scenes in which the living king and his subjects had been engaged; the royal tombs were a kind of mimic palaces, with halls, and corridors, and galleries in regular succession-on till they reached the Chamber of State in which the sarcophagus reposed. The meaner subjects were crowded, as in the living city, in one vast repository. The whole valley of the Nile is flanked on either hand by rocky mountains, in which, on the Libyan or Arabian side, according to the site of the city, or the near vicinity of the mountain chain, each nome or capital hewed out its own spacious cemetery. The natural supposition would be that these excavations were originally the quarries from which the stone for building the cities was hewn, and which, like the Catacombs of Paris, were afterwards turned into cemeteries for the dead.† Signor Rosellini, however, contests this opinion, it appears to us, with cogent arguments; and it seems, that the great quarries of Mokattan and Silsilis, from which the materials for many of the cities and mighty edifices had been drawn, were never converted to the purpose of sepulchres. In these different necropoleis, there are no doubt multitudes of sepulchral chambers yet to be discovered, to be * See the account in Wilkinson of the studious and artful means employed to conceal the access to 'Belzoni's Tomb.'-p. 101. There is a very remarkable similitude between the cemeteries of the old Etruscan cities of Italy and those of Egypt. This is a subject which opens a very wide and attractive subject of speculation, in the pursuit of which Italian scholars must feel great interest and possess peculiar advantages. cleared eleared from the overwhelming sand, to be penetrated by the courage and perseverance of European travellers. It is in them that these scenes of Egyptian life are traced, painted on the walls in many instances in colours which retain all their original freshness and splendour. Of all these the sepulchral chambers of the Theban necropolis are by far the most spacious and magnificent; but those of Beni Hassan appear to furnish the most curious illustrations of common life. It is here that the trades, manufactures, and agricultural pursuits are depicted in regular compartments. The principle of devoting so much cost and toil to the everlasting palaces of departed monarchs, which probably gave rise to the construction of the pyramids, and unquestionably to the excavation of the royal tombs of Biban el Moluk, once admitted, the decoration of the walls with religious processions, or with painted legends of the glory of the deceased, may seem less inexplicable. The care, the skill, the expense lavished on the embalming of the perishable body is in perfect unison with this preparation of a splendid and durable dwelling for the remains, which were to be immortalized by every means in human power*. Still there is to us something unaccountable in this delineation of every occupation of life in the habitations of the dead. We comprehend the gradual expansion of that feeling, from which the poor Indian' who 'Thinks, admitted to the equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company' is buried with his arrows, and with the companion of his hunter life. Hence, with the Hindu, with the Gete, with the Gothic warrior, the steed, the captive, and the wife were entombed together, the living with the dead, under the vast sepulchral mound. If the paintings were merely intended to designate the rank, the profession, the occupation of the deceased, the warlike scene in the tomb of the military caste, scenes of rural labour in that of the peasant or agriculturist, their purport would be evident; but some of the tombs appear to be decorated with every kind of device there seems to have been almost a deliberate design to make this subterranean world a complete antetype, as it were, of the real world above. The whole question, in truth, is a profound and impenetrable mystery. Of all the learned and ingenious writers on the subject, none has succeeded in tracing with satisfactory per * We must not neglect this opportunity of noticing the very curious and interesting History of Egyptian Mummies,' published last year, by Mr. Pettigrew. The author's scientific decomposition of the mummies, which he has examined, has thrown a very clear light on the whole process of embalming, and there is much valuable Egyptian lore collected in his work, which is moreover written in an elegant and attractive style. We are always glad to find science and learning in close conjunction; and above all to find them both pursued with success in the midst of the active labours of a professional life. K 2 spicuity spicuity the fine and subtle, yet strong and enduring threads, which connected the extraordinary honours paid by the Egyptians to their dead, with the rest of their religious creed. The ancient writers state the fact, rather than solve the difficulty. The wellknown passage from Diodorus, adduced by Rosellini, and which, in his opinion, affords a satisfactory solution of this great problem, suggests to us new and not less embarrassing questions:-'O yap ἐγχωρίοι τον μεν εν τῷ ζῆν χρόνον ἐυτελῆ παντελῶς εἶναι νομίζουσι, τὸν δὲ μετὰ τὴν τελευτὴν δι ̓ ἀρετην μνημοθευσόμενοι, περὶ πλείστου ποιῦνται· καὶ τὰς μὲν τῶν ζώντων οἰκήσεις καταλύσεις ονομάζουσιν, ὡς ὀλίγον χρόνον εν ταυταις οἰκούντων ἡμῶν, τοὺς δὲ τῶν τετελευτηκότων τάφους, ἀιδίους δικους προσαγορέυουσιν, ὡς ἐν ᾅδου διατελουντων τὸν ἄπειρον ἀιῶνά. Διόπερ τῶν μὲν κατὰ τὰς οἰκίας κατασκευῶν ἧττον φροντίζουσι, περὶ δὲ τὰς ταφὰς ὑπερβολὴν οὐκ ἀπολείπουσι φιλοτιμίας. The natives of Egypt consider the present life as altogether of slight importance; but that after death, when celebrity has been obtained by virtue, they estimate at much higher value; and they call the dwellings of the living places of sojourn (caravansaries), since we inhabit them so short a time: but they call the sepulchres of the dead eternal mansions, since in Hades we live for an interminable period. Wherefore they take little care as to the building of their houses, but neglect no excess of magnificence in their sepulchres.' (Diod. i. 51.) Was then Hades and the sepulchre with them the same? Did the conscious spirit still inhabit its undecaying body, take pride in the stately halls and corridors and chambers, which formed its eternal palaces; survey its ancient occupations, and act over again in untiring succession the deeds of its brief earthly life? Quæ gratia currûm Armorumque fuit vivis, quæ cura nitentes Pascere equos, eadem sequitur tellure repostos?' The prophets of Israel, as -Bishop Lowth has shown in one of the noblest passages of his 'Lectures on Hebrew Poetry,' derived all the imagery of their Scheol, the dwelling of the departed, from their rock-hewn sepulchres. But to this they would be led by a very different process of the imaginative powers, from that which would prepare, as it were, a splendid infernal world for the habitation of the body, immortalized as far as was in the power of human skill. Some, as Zoega and Creuzer, have argued, from a more strict interpretation of the celebrated passage in Herodotus (ii. 123), that, according to the Egyptian belief, the soul did not commence its transmigration till the absolute dissolution of the body (ro owμaтos naтa@livovTos). Upon this principle, they suppose, may be explained the anxious solicitude for the preservation of the body. The |